and while ordinary people do ordinary things, corporations like Nestlé are are privatizing drinking water and trying to patent plants like the Fennel Flower. The human race will NOT stop this -- that is certain!

Wednesday April 24, 2013, 6:45 am
Are they still trying to privatize water? I thought they had been slapped down a number of years ago when they were caught selling water to the PRC? I know they paid a fine but the water which was taken out by container ship loads was never returned.
How about we boycott all Nestle and Nestle subsidiary made products? Our purchasing power can put them out of business or at least put enough of a dent in their profits to make them listen.

Wednesday April 24, 2013, 7:32 am
Wow!! How can anyone patent something that is not even their creation??? Seems as if some people/companies have the God-syndrome, doesn't it?? And, yes, we can always boycott them, but how many will??

Wednesday April 24, 2013, 1:49 pm
Isn't capitalism wonderful! Good old corporate greed seems to be as American as apple pie. This is only one of scores of examples of how this country is being dominated by corporate plutocrats. Nestle is going to patent something the fennel flower and drinking water; meanwhile, we have ALEC -- the American Legislative Exchange Council -- writing AG Gag legislation for various States to protect corporations like Tyson Foods, Smithfield Dairy and Borden from whistle blowers who expose the extreme animal cruelty that these entities are all guilty of, and it's all for sake of the almighty dollar. The Dollar is God, and we are all damned.

Wednesday April 24, 2013, 2:10 pm
We should definitely grow our own fennel flowers if in an appropriate climate and wait for these pathetic companies to throw a tantrum. Only by boycotting or flying in their face when they think they are above the law will we win against these criminal elements.

Wednesday April 24, 2013, 6:49 pm
SumOfUs: "In a paper published last year, Nestlé scientists claimed to “discover” what much of the world has known for millennia: that nigella sativa extract could be used for “nutritional interventions in humans with food allergy”.

But instead of creating an artificial substitute, or fighting to make sure the remedy was widely available, Nestlé is attempting to create a nigella sativa monopoly and gain the ability to sue anyone using it without Nestlé’s permission. Nestlé has filed patent applications -- which are currently pending -- around the world.

Prior to Nestlé's outlandish patent claim, researchers in developing nations such as Egypt and Pakistan had already published studies on the same curative powers Nestlé is claiming as its own. And Nestlé has done this before -- in 2011, it tried to claim credit for using cow’s milk as a laxative, despite the fact that such knowledge had been in Indian medical texts for a thousand years.

This isn't surprising, considering Nestle has a long track record of not caring about ethics. After all, this is the corporation that poisoned its milk with melamine, purchases cocoa from plantations that use child slave labor, and launched a breast milk substitute campaign in the 1970s that contributed to the suffering and deaths of thousands of babies from poor communities.

But we also know that Nestlé is sensitive to public outcry, and that it's been beaten at the patent game before. If we act fast, we can put enough pressure on Nestlé to get it to drop its patent plans before they harm anyone -- but if we want any chance at affecting Nestlé's decision, we have to speak out now, while its patent claims are still under review."

----Update:
"Nestlé has written up an official response to our our demands on its site, but the conglomerate's defense is ridiculous: Nestlé claims everything is OK because it is not patenting the flower itself, just the flower's traditional medicinal use. Nestlé's official patent, filed in countries around the world, claims that it "invented" use of nigella sativa to treat allergic reactions, despite the fact that the flower has been used for this very purpose across the Middle East and Asia for over a millennium."